Recently social scientists have demonstrated an increasing interest in famines and their sociocultural effects. However, as William Torry notes, empirical research on famines at the local community level particularly in terms of quantitative household surveys, longitudinal studies, or the junctures of relationships linking the local community with regional or national levels of organization are extremely scarce (1984: 229, 243, 245–7; 1986:13).

Consolidated imperial rule tends to alter the relationships among indigenous elites. Some elite groups may adjust to the new regime by joining it or otherwise becoming collaborators in rule. Others may see a marked deterioration in their former ruling status and honor. Groups which cooperated politically during the pre-colonial period may experience new tensions and enter into relationships of a more adversary nature. It is sometimes difficult for observers of social and political change to see clearly the nature of the new conflicts among elites and the directions of cleavage. For this reason a lack of consensus pervades scholarly assessments of the meaning of the development of tensions between high-status non-Brahmans and Brahmans in south India early in the twentieth century. It is not clear why anti-Brahmanism emerged in the ideology of the Justice Party, a party of landholding interests.Was this development another example of the exacerbation of social distinctions under imperial rule, analogous to the Hindu-Muslim communalism which emerged in north India? Or, as one opinion has it, was the ideological change an opportunistic maneuver on the part of a group of politicians, encouraged by British officials anxious to foil the nationalist movement? This paper takes an approach more in line with the first alternative and sees the propagation of an ideology of ethnic antagonism as a result of processes of the reformation of group and personal identities. I link the reformation of group identity to the confusion in rules regarding group behavior which resulted from the imposition and operation of the imperial system of dispute management, the Anglo-Indian legal system.

Things were not right in the Kantō region during the early nineteenth century. In his memoirs, Mastsudaira Sadanobu, architect of the Kansei Reforms, lamented the sorry state of the villages in Edo's hinterland:

Much land throughout the Kantō is going to waste for want of cultivators. All the people of some villages have left for Edo, leaving only the headman behind. … Many Kantō villagers are suffering great hardship. Babies are killed, the population has declined, and land has gone to waste.

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.

An outstanding feature of the far-reaching plans for development which China has been earnestly promoting under the general rubric of the ‘four modernizations’ is the post-Mao leadership's determined effort to revive and thoroughly institutionalize a meaningful and formal legal system. There is an obvious and sharp distinction between the policies towards law pursued during the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s and the more recent attempts to fashion a pivotal role for law in Chinese society. Throughout much of the course of socialist rule China's leaders have been concerned not with promoting effective legal institutions but, rather, with the direct insertion of extrinsic political norms and values into the law. During the Cultural Revolution many important legal structures ceased to function. In contrast, in the years since 1978 an important aspect of the rigorous political reaction to the uncertainty and conflict of the Cultural Revolution has been unequivocal support for the establishment of a sound legal system. The leadership now believes that systematic and regulated law-making, public awareness of the law, and proper application of the rules should be integral elements in the administration of justice in the PRC. The hope is that this approach will prevent the recurrence of arbitrary political rule, curb reliance on ‘connections’ or guanxi in bureaucratic conduct, promote economic growth and generally encourage the development of a more predictable and orderly social life.

In 1985 riots racked the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, continuing for a period of almost half a year, form February through July, leaving some 275 people dead, thousands injured, tens of thousands homeless, and a loss of property and trade estimated at Rs 2,200 crores (US$1.75 thousand million) (India Today, 13 August 1985, pp. 60 and 119), in ‘the most alarmingly sustained bout of rioting (as opposed to the sort of terrorism Punjab suffered…) since India's independence’ (Manor 1986: 102).

The subject of this paper is the fate of progressive taxation in South Asia. This is a subject about which Kingsley Martin himself would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, he strongly advocated a redistributive fiscal strategy. On the other hand, he was never at all comfortable examining the kind of economic analysis with which it is usually justified. Somewhat unfairly, he distrusted all orthodox economists on moral grounds (Martin, 1966: 34). Moreover, his prolonged encounter with the unorthodox economics of Maynard Keynes was equally unsatisfactory as an educational experience. Lord Boothby summed up Martin's efforts to learn the technicalities of economics from Keynes as follows: ‘Kingsley simply never understood economics and yet he was always trying to understand. “Explain it to me, then” he would say, but his attention soon wandered’ (Rolph, 1973: 195).